How To Redesign Infrastructure Operations For Agentic AI

Dilip Kumar is the President & Global Head of Infrastructure Solutions at NTT DATA.

​AI can operate at machine speed, but the operating models governing the infrastructure behind it often cannot. ​​

We saw this through our own AI transformation at NTT DATA. After we connected more than 21 enterprise data sources to AI systems, we still struggled to connect signals to context, context to decisions and decisions to governed execution.

An AI agent can identify an anomaly, retrieve information, invoke applications and recommend or initiate action within seconds. The infrastructure supporting that agent, however, often relies on fragmented tools, manual investigations, specialist handoffs and tickets sitting in queues. ​

Consider a familiar operational practice: An alert becomes a ticket and passes sequentially through specialist teams. AI may accelerate the diagnosis, but response times will remain slow if approvals and execution have to continue moving through the same queues.

For infrastructure leaders, solving this issue requires making three shifts.

1. Connect data to decisions.

Enterprise environments span multiple technology domains and providers. As a result, operational data, telemetry, security events and business context are often fragmented across platforms and teams.

A high-impact event rarely remains within one organizational boundary. A performance issue might appear as a poor user experience while its cause lies in the network, identity service, cloud platform or a security change. In these cases, one team sees the symptom, another holds the relevant telemetry and a third understands the business impact. Until those views are connected, teams are coordinating interpretations rather than resolving the problem.

2. Orchestrate intelligent actions.

​Tickets will not disappear. They remain important systems of record, providing auditability, governance and exception management. But they do not need to initiate and coordinate every infrastructure response.